Eventually Leareth clears his throat and asks, out loud and only sounding a little out of breath, if he can please have something to write on so he can note down what he might've done wrong and have Cayaldwin look at it. 

Andalites acquired ink and paper for the purpose of dropping notes at his message drop and can fetch him some.

They are not the most coherent notes Leareth has ever written, but he can eventually, with a lot of effort, scribble down what he thinks he did and what he thinks he should have done, in offensively terrible math notation that should hopefully still be readable to Cayaldwin, who's been helping him with the whole process so far. Mostly he thinks he wasn't correctly accounting for the 'distance between planes' that apparently depends on how deep one is in a gravity well. Probably he can get it right on the second try but also he is absolutely not walking through a Gate he can't see the other side of ever again.

He blearily hands off the notes to whoever's nearby and then goes to sleep. 

Sandra is hovering, feeling ticked off with herself that she apparently can't follow any of that, which is kind of a blow to her ego. She'll convey the notes to Cayaldwin and the hyperspace engineers, though. 

<When all of this is over you can go get a degree in planar maths, maybe. I think Matirin's aiming to sell it as - look at these people whose technology developed down a different path than ours because of their innate aptitude for magic, but they're still a starfaring civilization, see, not at all on us for dropping tech on them...>

"Leareth could've got it without your math hints, I'm sure of it, once he knew there was another world out there to look for. Just would've taken a year or ten instead of a goddamned week." Sandra scowls at the paper. "I hope you can make some sense of what he did wrong here." 

He is perusing it. <I think he's right that he didn't account for the gravity well. We should not have let him try that but he seemed very confident...> Swish swish and maybe the faintest hint of pain in his mind voice. 

"It's not your fault. And - he's fine, right? Will be fine, anyway. His shields didn't take all of it but they helped, he got himself back here in - we tried to calculate back based on your travel time and it was less than twenty seconds - gods, he's good, he seemed to think it was embarrassing to need that long but even a normal Gate with a doorway and all takes me a minute..." 

<People are not usually conscious more than twenty seconds in vacuum. He's fine but he nearly - well, I guess he'd just go steal someone else...> This is in any event not what the faint pain was about; he's cheerier.

Sandra doesn't really get what was bothering him, then, but people skills were never really her thing and she leaves it alone. "Is there a safer way to test it next time, that doesn't require sending a person through?" 

<Yes, now that we don't need the printer for the ship we can build lots of little robots who can go test everything for us. We should've built one before we left this time. No one will go through a Gate until we have lots of sensors and an image on the other side.>

Sigh. "That's something. At least it was Leareth who found this out and not - someone who would've been less equipped to handle it..." 

<Yes. And - it's really good news, that he might be able to get the Gate to work.>

"Yes." Also terrifying because it makes all of this more real, somehow. Sandra really likes the part of her job that involves SCIENCE and much, much less the parts of her job that involve fighting. 

He tries to model Leareth's Gating well enough his model can predict that he'd land in the middle of space but he's really confused about how Gate-targeting works in the first place so he can't quite make it work.

Leareth spends the rest of the afternoon either asleep or very miserable. The backlash is slowly clearing by itself and the Healers make some progress on repairing the lung damage.

Eventually he yanks himself fully awake, sits up, and asks whether he can walk around, and whether he has to stay in this room or can go back somewhere less...well, mostly somewhere with fewer people and things happening, it's hard to rest or think here. 

"I think you can walk around if you feel all right, but they made the air different in this room so you can breathe better...?" She looks at the Andalite doctor for clarification. 

<The atmospheric pressure is higher here and the air is all oxygen, which is the part of air that humans use. You should stay in this room though we could leave so it is less busy.> The conference rooms on nice modern Dome ships can do pressure and vary the atmosphere, as some kind of interspecies diplomacy initiative, but this is not a nice modern Dome ship, it was - semi-lawfully acquired in the mess of their departure from their homeworld and it cannot do that. 

Leareth nods. "How long is it going to take before I can try more Gates, do you know?" 

<I think that depends less on your health and more on how long it takes to retrofit a spacesuit.>

Leareth chases after the word-concept. "- Fascinating." He rubs his head. "I am sorry for - all this, I feel very stupid that I did not think to take precautions for that kind of error." 

The doctor does not feel particularly inconvenienced by people injuring themselves, that's what they do, it's a war, it's not as bad as the poor fellow who's stuck as a bird. <I think you will be recovered in a timeframe that does not much impede war preparations.>

Except that his successfully getting the Gate solved might be their main bottleneck. Leareth nods, though. "Anyway, I would appreciate if there were fewer people here tonight. Also fewer lights." 

One of the Healers very determinedly argues that she's going to stay overnight watching him, which Leareth eventually bargains down to having her check on him every so often. 

He puts more wards on the room; they shouldn't interfere with any of the technology. It's a very annoying duplication of effort because his conference room already has them, but, apparently, he is stuck here.

Leareth is in a slightly better mood a candlemark later, though, as his headache subsides. He goes to sleep feeling fairly optimistic about the whole thing.